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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing is why I EXCLUSIVELY browse the Internet on my phone while at work (without using work wifi, of course). I also never use my work email for personal correspondence, ever.

Granted, I work at a remarkably lax institution that cares more about getting the job done and less about managing our lives, but these are habits I picked up working in Silicon Valley and I couldn't even imagine the kinds of perpetual monitoring that some of my friends from college have to put up with.

Nobody cares about how long I'm in the bathroom. They like the software I write. And then we all go home at 5.

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Yeah, I am always shocked when I see people logged in to services and stuff at work. I use my phone, never on work wifi, to check e-mail, and if something comes up that needs a real interface, I use my laptop (on work wifi, but with a VPN to my home router). Doing anything else seems like madness to me.

I use personal accounts at work. If texts to my wife are a problem, sure have at it. I'll start circulating my resume.

Luckily I've never worked at an organization that wanted to own my life to that extent.

Also, if my work is being measured by time spent on task instead of output, I'm working in the wrong place.

Eh, I figured everything I did on the corp network was visible to my employer, but I also didn't care for the most part. If I'm going to post on Hacker News or Reddit, it's on the public Internet, and so having corporate network monitoring catch it is the least of my worries.

I just figured that the best defense against getting fired is delivering value to my employer; they didn't care if I take a HN break as long as my overall productivity stayed high. The same applies now that I'm self-employed, too.

I did tend to use my phone for personal IMs & emails, but that was because we also used GMail for work, and I didn't want to bother with having an incognito window open all the time.

What happens if your employer sets up a stingray to intercept your cellular communications?

Hopefully they document the fact in discoverable fashion, so your lawsuit can have that extra "human rights violation" flavor.

I have friends who not only login to all of the services at work, but use their employer-provided laptop as their ONLY computer. It kind of blows my mind. I'm not as strict about the separation as some, but I can't fathom using my work computer for all of my personal stuff outside of work.

This was sort of understandable in the '90s when decent (for then) laptops were expensive. It is baffling today now that laptops are cheaper than many phones.

I'm in government. They gave me a laptop at one point. I gave it back. It's simply not worth having.

I run a portable browser in an encryped drive, even then I turn the caching on it off to it at least doesn't leave as many traces.

I'm in IT so I know what we monitor.

If you are part of a conglomerate you also have to consider the possibility that another IT group is snarfing your traffic for employee monitoring and IDS purposes. I've actually seen an overeager IDS I didn't even know existed shut down network access for legitimate services.

I remember this from my welcome screen on an Amazon-blessed laptop: "There is no expectation of privacy while using this system".

How would they track you through wifi?

An organization can use transparent proxies and log web traffic for anyone using the network, among other things.

But how do they know it's your phone?

MAC address and traffic patterns. Also corporate wifi often requires logging in with your company credentials.

EAP or meta data.

a MAC address that doesn't belong to one of their systems pops up on the network. They're red-flags, and tracked as such.

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